Derek Lee

[Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, June 5th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the hon. member if she would agree that this bill, while it has the intention of dealing with a problem that has been cited in the House and by committees of the House, actually does not do anything to protect foreign workers at all because all it does is prevent people from becoming foreign workers?

Would the member agree that the challenge of dealing with exploitation, sexual or otherwise, of people in Canada is a job that goes way beyond the immigration department and involves society generally, and our police forces and communities?

Would she also agree that the name of the game with the Immigration Act is to enhance the movement of people in and out of Canada with appropriate protections, of course, but that the bill must do everything it can to facilitate the movement of labour into Canada because it is that labour that is needed and it is that labour that the general sections of the Immigration Act were originally enacted to facilitate?

[Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, June 5th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member continues his government's unexplained fascination with sex and drugs, having mentioned the buzzwords more than once in this legislation. In his remarks he referred explicitly to exotic dancers and strippers, when this legislation clearly applies to every work permit for every work situation that exists across the board.

I have two questions. The member said the government would ensure there is compliance with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms when clearly the impact of this legislation will be on individuals abroad who make application. In the ordinary course of events, of course, our charter does not apply to people outside Canada. So, how is the government going to ensure that his statement and commitment here that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms would be complied with, will be?

Second, the member has referred to accountability. Quite clearly, the ministerial instructions referred to in this are referred in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act where it states that they “are not statutory instruments”. As he knows, a joint committee of this House reviews every statutory instrument that is produced by the government. How will he ensure that the standing joint committee will have the ability to properly scrutinize any ministerial instructions issued under the statute?

[National Security Committee of Parliamentarians Act, May 18th, 2007]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-447, An Act to establish the National Security Committee of Parliamentarians.

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to introduce this bill which would establish a committee of parliamentarians to oversee and scrutinize national security within our Canadian parliamentary precincts. The committee would be a joint committee of senators and members of the House.

This bill is similar in format to that which had all party agreement in the last Parliament and which was introduced and died on the order paper at the time of dissolution of the last Parliament. I am hoping this bill will also have all party agreement in this Parliament. I am looking forward to the response of the government to this policy initiative.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)

[Business of the House, May 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I find the opposition House leader has asked what is called the usual Thursday question in an attempt to determine the future business of the House for the week to follow.

The reply of the government House leader I can only describe as disingenuous. He has taken the opportunity to give a speech about virtually the entire government agenda, of which he may be very proud, but which was not the purpose of the question.

If these kinds of liberties are going to be continued to be taken by the government House leader, it may destroy the whole purpose of the Thursday question. He should take that into account, and I think you should too, Mr. Speaker.

[Criminal Code, May 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I would never second-guess the hon. member in articulating on behalf of his constituents, or for that matter, any MP here. That is what we are here to do. I have worked with the member on the justice committee. We do not always agree, but most of the time we do and it has been a good run over a number of years.

However, I wanted to ask two questions. The first one is really a comment. In the matter involving the grain farmers who were ultimately jailed, as I recall it, I believe they were fined by the court. When they came back to court, not having paid their fines, not because they could not afford to but because they refused in protest to pay the fines, I believe the court had no alternative but to resort to either imprisonment or contempt. The court resorted to the short jailing. So the member is correct. It happened, but the sequence involved more than just selling grain and going to jail. It was more complex than that.

Does the member not think that in this House from time to time we are forced by reason of the federal jurisdiction to focus on only two things when it comes to response to criminal activity? The only thing we can do federally is write the Criminal Code and from time to time set the sentencing range. That is all we get to do.

With criminal activity there has to be an offence, an investigation, it may need police intelligence gathering, a charge, a conviction, and a sentence, but we only write the law and deal with the sentencing. The provinces and the cities do the policing, the investigation, and the prosecution is done by the provinces. So, we actually may be kind of frustrated from time to time that we do not have a greater role on the ground in the components.

Does the member not think that out of frustration from time to time we federally may tend to overemphasize our role in that whole complex thing with just the law and the sentencing?

[Criminal Code, May 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I hope the member is not suggesting that there is a whole bunch of four year mandatory minimum sentences in the code, because there is only one. It is section 344 and it is robbery with a firearm. Robbery with a firearm currently has a four year mandatory minimum.

All the other offences to which the hon. member has made reference are the one year mandatory minimums which currently exist in the code and which the Liberal Party in the last election said it would double. Making a one a two or two years less a day is a far cry and much different from three, five, seven and 10. That is the difference. That is a huge difference.

[Criminal Code, May 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the reference to doubling the mandatory minimums was with respect to the now existing one year mandatory minimums, which were applied to quite a broad spectrum of firearm offences and which exist in the code now.

It is one thing to double one year to two years or two years less a day. There is one offence--

[Criminal Code, May 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I did not say that everything was A-okay. I said that the current sentencing regime in the Criminal Code was generally working all right. However, there has never been a time in the history of the human race when there has not been a problem with crime, let us say, ever since Cain killed Abel. There also has never been a time when we have not found the need to alter the Criminal Code. We are always adjusting. I have been here for 19 years and I can hardly recall a year when there was not a Criminal Code amendment on the order paper somewhere. There are 15 of them now.

The point is that it is one thing to respond to public perception that there is a problem but it is another thing to analyze it from a public policy point of view to see exactly what the problem is and what the best response is. A whole bunch of knee-jerking, increase the sentencing and get tough on crime things, without dealing with the public policy issue in detail and with precision is not my way of doing things.

If a problem is seen, I really do want to address it. If a weak sentence in a particular case or systemically is a problem for society, if we saw one place where we, as a society, had to really firm up, like we did with drunk driving and with firearm offences three years ago, and as we might need to do in other things in society, I am prepared to do that.

What I do not support is the approach in the current bill that simply lists about 20 different things and says that we will now impose an escalating three, five, seven, ten-year thing where we know statistically, based on corrections' social science, there is no payback unless we need to keep an offender in because he or she is a danger.

[Criminal Code, May 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I did say in my remarks that I support, as does my party, the existence of mandatory minimum penalties for drunk driving offences. Those penalties, of course, start off with a mandatory fine and then the offender will do time after a second offence. The person will not do seven years, but the person will do a few weeks, although I do not recall exactly how many weeks. The point is that with the mandatory minimum the offender will do time. There is an escalator for a third offence and the offender will do more time. However, we are talking about doing time as opposed to doing years and years of time.

The reason I would object to the escalating three, five, seven and ten-year type escalation is that the three, five, seven and ten years have never been shown to provide any more public safety. If it is necessary to keep the individual in jail because the person is a very violent offender, then the judge should impose a lengthy sentence of that nature.

However, I object to the automatic, structured, built-in, no exception mandatory minimum in the bill running up to seven years.

[Criminal Code, May 17th, 2007]

There is nothing shameful about this. This is a House of free speech.

In any event, I want to note that throughout the country there is a perception that there has been an increase in violent crime. In the statistical data if we look back into the 1960s and forward to the present, we can see an increase in crime. Many criminologists say it is actually an increase in reported crime. The criminal activity of the 1960s and early in the 1970s, was in fact arguably under reported so that our data was a little bit lower than it actually should have been. In any event, the trend line was there. We can see the material increase from the 1960s right up to 1992.

In 1992 things changed sociologically. I do not believe it was anything government did or did not do. We were in a bit of an economic recession at the time but we can see the trend line. After that point in time, all criminal activity starts to drop. I still accept that there is a perception in society, that people see a lot more crime. They are certainly getting a lot more media. We have more television, more newspapers and more Internet. If there is something happening out there in crime, people are going to hear about it and that may exacerbate the public policy problem.

I am not saying there is not any crime. There is a truckload of it and it is a social issue, but it is not increasing in the way that people are being led to believe that it is. In Toronto there was a sense that we had of a very serious firearm problem about two years ago. That was true. There was a clear spike and increase in the number of shootings and firearm incidents in Toronto. As I am going to point out a little later, that year 2005 turns out to be spike, a spike up and down. Things are actually quite different now.

However, in looking at crime statistics from across the country, I can see that not every city, not every urban area or every rural area is in the same position. There are cities in Canada that have crime rates almost double what they are in Toronto or Montreal. That may seem counterintuitive to many of us, but while big cities do have crime, small cities also have crime. In some cases the rates of crimes, not necessarily the raw incidents, are significantly higher than some of our other urban areas.

In these places across Canada, citizens definitely have an issue. I represent a Toronto area riding. It is impossible for me to speak about this issue without acknowledging that in various parts of the country, the north, the east, the west, the south, there are different takes, different perceptions of just how bad or how good or where the level of criminal activity is.

Before going on any further, on the sentencing that is currently in the Criminal Code, including the existing mandatory minimums that I mentioned earlier for firearms, my party in the last election campaign did undertake to increase the mandatory minimum penalties. The member opposite makes that point, but the increases that were proposed were an increase of the one year and four year penalties that were there.

What the government had proposed in Bill C-10 was a whole regime of increasing mandatory minimums, an escalating scheme of mandatory minimums that ran three, five, seven and up to 10 years. That is a much different kettle of fish than what the Liberal Party had proposed, of targeted, specific, reasonable mandatory minimum adjustments in the Criminal Code. Maybe we could put that debate to rest. Was it discussed in the election? It sure was, but I wanted to be clear about what my party had proposed.

We are not talking about creating a new offence. This bill does not create new offences. This bill does not create new sentences. All of that is already in the Criminal Code. What the bill does, and I could say only, is create a mandatory minimum sentence at the bottom end. Judges in this country are charged with sentencing and they can give the appropriate sentence and they do. Ninety-nine per cent of the time they give the right sentence. They can sentence to more than the mandatory minimum and sometimes they do, but it depends on a whole number of criteria set out in the Criminal Code. We legislated them here about 10 years ago.

In my view the criminal justice system from the point of view of the sentencing regime is working quite well. Once in a while there is an aberration. Once in a while there is a circumstance in a court and a judge and a set of facts that looks a little odd. A newspaper, a television station, a reporter will see it and think it looks strange, that a penalty looks a little stiff, or that a penalty looks a little light and it becomes a public issue, but those cases are far and few between. We just see a lot more of them now because we have a lot more media. If it is a story, it is a story.

In one of the comments on this bill earlier today there was a scenario that I found very compelling at the committee. It relates to sentencing in the rural areas, in the north, the west and the east of the country, but generally in the north. We have to remember that before someone is actually sentenced, there has to be an investigation, the person is charged, convicted in a trial and then is sentenced.

A witness at the committee made this point in a very compelling way. When there is a conviction in a northern community for an offence, even if a violent one, the only prospect for rehabilitation and reintegration of an offender from those northern communities is if he or she is able to be in that community.

It is just not possible to take offenders from a northern community, yank them out, send them to some place in the south and hope that they can rehabilitate or reintegrate. They are not from the south. They are citizens of our north.

Instituting a mandatory minimum regime of sentences over two years essentially ensures a federal sentence. All sentences over two years are served in federal penitentiaries. Sentences under two years are served in provincial penitentiaries. By imposing mandatory minimums way beyond the two years, this type of sentencing would remove individuals from their northern communities and place them in a federal penitentiary, which could be a thousand miles away or two thousand miles away, but not even close to their communities.

It is generally accepted that prisons are simply warehouses for offenders, where young people actually learn better how to become criminals. Prisons are not the best location. I accept that we need them to protect society, at least as a clearing house, but the witness from the north said that the existence of these new sentencing regimes with mandatory minimums greater than two years would make it virtually impossible to rehabilitate and reintegrate offenders from those northern communities. In other words, we are creating lost causes before we even begin.

Members may ask me what I would propose for someone who has committed a serious crime and needs to do serious time. The criminal justice system has already provided for that with a regime of sentencing options and a skilled judge who will make the decision on what an appropriate sentence for that convicted offender will be, taking into consideration all aspects of the case, including the circumstances of the victim, previous criminal record, propensity to reoffend and prospects for rehabilitation. That is what we ask our judges to do. The escalating sentencing regime contained in this bill would, practically speaking, remove all of those options from a sentencing judge. If the bill passes, that will be the case. I regret that but that is the way it is.

In the remarks of my friend opposite, he referred to the spike this year in Toronto of gun crimes. I am pleased to report that while in 2005-06 the incidents of shootings were at about 87 and 81, this year the number of shootings to date is at 60, which is a drop of over 25%. The reason for that is good policing. However, I do not have time to go into the details. One shooting is too many but if we have a huge city with a few million people, we will have incidents, and I am saying that there has been a 25% drop. The perceived increase in these firearm incidents is not there, and these decreases have occurred under current laws. I just wanted to get that on the record. I give a lot of credit to the Toronto police and their new policing methods.